Public Administration Under Pressure: A Scoping Review of Bureaucratic Reactions and Performance

A growing body of research examines how public administrations function under political, media, and public pressure, with particular attention paid to the pressures associated with democratic backsliding and populist governance. This literature has established that such pressure can be harmful, but it has not yet systematically specified under which conditions this is the case. Pressure on public administration is a multifaceted phenomenon, and a range of perceptual, organizational, and institutional conditions shape how administrative entities react to it and what consequences those reactions carry for performance. Based on the PRISMA protocol, this article conducts a scoping review of the existing literature to analyze through which mechanisms and administrative reactions and under which conditions pressure influences public administration. We first map the existing literature descriptively, then examine how pressure, administrative reactions, and performance implications are connected, and finally develop a contingency model that identifies the conditions under which pressure triggers reactions which affect performance. The article contributes to the literature by providing this model alongside an analysis of how the existing literature has studied the topic, and by proposing a research agenda that identifies the specific empirical gaps future work should address.